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Feb 6

Jean Grey #7-11 – “Psych Wars”

Posted on Tuesday, February 6, 2018 by Paul in x-axis

Well, now we know where this was heading: it gets replaced by X-Men Red, a fourth X-Men title (and bear in mind two of the other ones are fortnightly), starring a revived original Jean Grey.  At least in terms of the plot mechanics, the point of all this was to set up Phoenix Resurrection and get her back into circulation.  We’ll get to Resurrection shortly, but let’s deal with Jean Grey first.

Sometimes the most frustrating books are the ones that have plenty of good stuff but don’t stick the landing.  And there is plenty of good stuff here.  Dennis Hopeless and his main artist Victor Ibáñez are strong when it comes to the character details that make characters feel rounded and believable, even when they’re doing something utterly divorced from human experience.  There’s a reassuring sense of (most of) this taking place in a recognisable real world.  Issue #8, which revisits the Morrison-era New X-Men school, looks fabulous.  Even when the characters decamp to the middle of nowhere in issue #9, at least it feels alive.  There’s some grounding for the giant cosmic bird to play against, and where the basic imagery of fire can look like a big thing.

It’s not even that Jean Grey is all detail and no big picture.  The shape of all this is clear enough: the younger Jean understandably wants to escape her fate of becoming Phoenix (and then Dark Phoenix).  But she keeps getting dragged back towards having to prepare for that fate, not only because the Phoenix itself is coming for her, but also because the ghost of the original Jean Grey is hanging around trying to prepare her.  It’s set up to be a coming of age story, then, in which young Jean faces down her unwanted destiny and comes out the other side.  And it plays rather cleverly with the idea that she isn’t the real Jean Grey; she’s certainly keen to insist that she’s not what everybody else means by “Jean Grey”.

But does all this come across?  There’s the problem.

The basic plot of these issues – technically “Psych Wars” starts with issue #8 but the real break point is at the start of issue #7 – sees ghost Jean trying one last push to ready the teenage Jean for the arrival of Phoenix.  Older Jean has always felt out of  character in this series, all the more so because she’s written more typically in Phoenix Resurrection, but I guess we have to read her behaviour in this series as a mix of frustration and desperation.  So her idea is basically to raid the mind of Emma Frost to recover a small sliver of the Phoenix which Emma has been holding onto since Avengers vs X-Men, on the vague notion that this might work as some sort of innoculation or something.  This doesn’t go especially well, and Emma ends up tagging along as they try to calm down the younger Jean.

Phoenix itself then shows up and Jean spends most of an issue taking her last stand against it, while the ghost Jean has a try at persuading the firebird to hold off until Jean is old enough to handle the power.  At which point Phoenix simply announces that it doesn’t accept this as the real Jean, and kills her.  That’s a genuinely good twist, one I didn’t see coming.  She’s not dead, of course – X-Men Blue wouldn’t stand for it – so the final issue of the series is an epilogue with her in the White Hot Room, basically visiting a series of former Phoenix hosts before having a brief showdown with the Phoenix itself and getting restored to life.

Which… is not altogether satisfying.  There’s a bunch of issues here.  It’s the sort of thing that comes close to being complexly layered, but just feels confused.

Let’s break it down.  There are other characters running around in these issues but we’re mainly concerned with the two Jeans, Emma and Phoenix itself.  For the older Jean, this seems to be a second chance to get Phoenix right; for some reason she seems to think that the young Jean is uniquely qualified to wind up as the new long-term Phoenix host, at least giving the right priming.  For the younger Jean, the Phoenix is more representative of the destiny she wants to escape.

For Emma…  Hmm.  Well, Jean’s spent most of this series meeting various Phoenix hosts who were, in varying degrees, supposedly traumatised by the experience.  Part of the book’s problem is that to buy into this idea takes a lot of reader charity, as it’s simply not how any of these characters have been written elsewhere.  Dennis Hopeless has tried very hard to reassert the awfulness of an encounter with the Phoenix, but when your story is based so directly on past continuity, you don’t really get to define your own terms in that way.  If anything, the horror of an encounter with the Phoenix might have been easier to sell without so many largely unscathed former hosts wandering around the book.  But at any rate, Emma is the only character in this book who seems to regard her experience with Phoenix positively.  Which could be interesting… but doesn’t seem to develop into anything.

Phoenix itself is not really a character so much as a symbol.  And again, we run into the question: a symbol for what?  Marvel’s cosmic pantheon is, shall we say, prone to literalism.  It’s big on anthropomorphic abstractions, with names like Death, Eternity, Love, Order and so forth.  Phoenix has never really fit into that mode, and quite what it is has always been a touch vague.  Sometimes it’s a kind of all-purpose embodiment of life and passion.  Sometimes it’s a more prosaic cycle of death and rebirth.  Sometimes it’s just a big scary thing because we all remember Dark Phoenix Saga, right?  Sometimes it’s an emblem of X-Men history and general X-Men-ness.  Go back to the original Chris Claremont scripts and you’ll find some stuff about kaballah – but none of this uncertainty was really a problem for him, because it served the story very well for Phoenix to be something unintelligible, ungraspable, and beyond human capacity.  (And religiously non-specific.)  In that context, the vaguer the better.  But that’s not really what we’re doing here.

Here, Phoenix seems to be mainly the cycle of death and rebirth, which ties in somewhat with the history-repeating nature of continuity; but it’s also sort of generally ominous and terrible, and what (if anything) it actually wants or is beyond A Thing That Wants Jean is never fleshed out.  And there’s a nagging feeling that the death/rebirth stuff is more a useful Jean-reviving device than anything else.  The final issue is profoundly unsatisfying, because there’s at least a certain symbolic logic to the idea of Phoenix killing one Jean in order to bring about the re-birth of the “real” one.  But killing the younger Jean and then bringing back both… that doesn’t feel right.  And it doesn’t seem to come out of anything in particular that happened in this series.  You have to wonder whether this was really the originally planned ending, or whether the plot has had to be awkwardly fudged to keep both Jeans in circulation going forward.

The idea, I suppose, is that by choosing to go her own way and not be a repeat Jean Grey, the new Jean somehow renders herself unacceptable to the Phoenix and avoids her fate.  She can’t beat Phoenix, as such, but her choices can make her into somebody different, and take her down a different route.  Does that work?  Kind of, I guess.  But only kind of.

Bring on the comments

  1. SanityOrMadness says:

    There are certainly signs that #11 was not what was originally intended. Here’s the solicit:

    “It was all leading up to this…young Jean Grey vs. the Phoenix! But after all her training, this might be a battle that she wasn’t prepared for at all. Now, trapped in a prison with former Phoenix hosts, Jean must use everything she’s learned to bust out! All this, plus what was up with that ghost Jean Grey?! Guest-starring Rachel Summers, Emma Frost, Quentin Quire, the Cuckoos and Hope!”

    Several of those don’t appear in any form, even Phoenix-flashback/replicant form, and it’s charitable to say the ending is “what was up with that ghost Jean Grey”. Moreover, Phoenix Resurrection apparently points readers to this issue to say where Rachel et al are, and that isn’t even vaguely addressed (even before you consider the contraction between the series over Emma Frost).

  2. Thom H. says:

    If I’m recalling my X-Men history correctly, then the big issue with the Phoenix being a cosmic entity is that it never was meant to be one in the first place.

    Claremont clearly meant Phoenix to actually be a powered-up Jean, and for Phoenix to be dead when Jean was dead. She just couldn’t handle the power, suicide on the moon, The End.

    And Morrison reinstated that idea in New X-Men. The Phoenix didn’t come from somewhere and inhabit Jean; it arose from within Jean. All powered up again, but this time she could hopefully handle it. Sadly, Magneto kills her before we find out.

    But for some reason, subsequent writers/editors needed the Phoenix to be separate and apart from Jean (or others who manifest Phoenix energy, like Quentin). It has to be a physical being that roams the galaxy looking for hosts (that it pretty much only finds on Earth, strangely) and causing trouble.

    And all without a purpose because it’s never been given one. The Phoenix was given narrative energy by being tied to the specific character of Jean. It’s “purpose” is to represent her inner struggle as the most powerful representative of mutantkind. Is she still human, something more, something less?

    If anything, the Phoenix should be repositioned as Jean’s unfinished business. That would explain why it’s constantly wandering the stars and repeatedly reviving Jean’s body. The Phoenix is her inability to be put down by death until she has answered the basic questions of her character.

    And it shouldn’t be just another cosmic entity that randomly inhabits the bodies of people like Namor or Colossus. Recently, it’s like the Phoenix prefers a Jean (or Jean stand-in), but will make do with whoever else is around. Which just renders the constant rehashing of this story even more watered down.

  3. Mo Walker says:

    Psych Wars felt like an arc that got truncated two-thirds of the way in development because of sales, scheduling or both. I figured the mystery involving the psychics would be resolved in Jean Grey, the final epilogue issue.

    I interpreted Ghost Jean Grey as an amalgamation of everyone’s impression/memories of Adult Jean Grey filter through Young Jean Grey’s lenses. Think the Spider-Ham that Spider-Gwen hallucinates. That is why Ghost Jean’s ‘odd characterization’ did not bother me much.

    Cosmic entity Phoenix needs a time out. AvX broke an already mangled concept and subsequent creators seem to treat it as a mcguffin. How does Thanos’ obsession with the Phoenix jive with any sort X-Men continuity.

  4. wwk5d says:

    “Claremont clearly meant Phoenix to actually be a powered-up Jean, and for Phoenix to be dead when Jean was dead. She just couldn’t handle the power, suicide on the moon, The End.”

    Didn’t Jean refer to the Phoenix as a cosmic entity at times during Claremont’s run?

    “And Morrison reinstated that idea in New X-Men. The Phoenix didn’t come from somewhere and inhabit Jean; it arose from within Jean. All powered up again, but this time she could hopefully handle it. Sadly, Magneto kills her before we find out.”

    But wasn’t Morrison the one to introduce the White Hot room and all those other Phoenixes (including Quire) in his last issue?

  5. Chris V says:

    I seem to remember Claremont writing an origin story for the Phoenix entity in one of his Classic X-Men back-up strips, which explained the Phoenix as a cosmic entity.

    The Phoenix needed to be separated from Jean Grey, originally, due to Shooter’s edict. Jean Grey committed genocide, therefore, she had to die.
    However, X-Factor was going to be the original X-Men, which mean Jean was needed.
    So, Shooter needed the creators to come up with a way that Jean could be brought back, while also doing away with the nasty business that Jean committed genocide.
    Hence, the ret-con that Jean Grey was never really the original Phoenix.

  6. FUBAR007 says:

    Chris V: I seem to remember Claremont writing an origin story for the Phoenix entity in one of his Classic X-Men back-up strips, which explained the Phoenix as a cosmic entity.

    Sort of. You’re thinking of Classic X-Men #43, detailing what happened to “Phoenix-Jean” right after she offed herself on the moon at the end of the Dark Phoenix Saga. She ends up at the “tower at the end of the universe” and meets an incarnation of Death who lays it out for her.

    So, Shooter needed the creators to come up with a way that Jean could be brought back, while also doing away with the nasty business that Jean committed genocide. Hence, the ret-con that Jean Grey was never really the original Phoenix.

    Sort of.

    Bob Layton and, I believe, Mike Carlin wanted to do an O5 book. At one point, it was going to be Scott, Warren, Hank, Bobby, and Madelyne Pryor. Then, it was going to be the four men and Dazzler.

    Then, John Byrne stepped in. A couple of years earlier, Kurt Busiek had come up with the “real Jean Grey is in a stasis pod at the bottom of Jamaica Bay” concept as a way to resurrect Jean. At some point, Busiek told Roger Stern who told Byrne. When Byrne heard about Layton’s O5 project, he told Layton about Busiek’s idea. Shooter approved, and X-Factor as we know it was greenlit.

    What I’ve always wanted to know is why no one at Marvel ever thought to take the shorter, cleaner route and simply reveal that Madelyne was Jean. She had no past. She had no relatives. They could’ve even worked in Busiek’s idea into her background somehow.

  7. Mo Walker says:

    wwk5d – You are right about Claremont and Morrison. I also attributed the notion of the Phoenix power coming from within Jean to Ultimate X-Men (Mark Millar and Robert Kirkman’s runs).

  8. jpw says:

    Yay. We can now add Jean Grey to the list of characters for whom we have multiple versions in circulation.

  9. Moo says:

    Meh, I think for some writers, Phoenix to them is what the Eiffel Tower is to Paris tourists. Meaning that, to them, if you don’t do something with Phoenix at some point or another, then you’re not doing X-Men right. It’s just a box tick now. Doesn’t matter what it does, doesn’t, should, or shouldn’t represent. It’s whatever the writer needs it to be. Wish they could just get rid of the damned thing, but whatever.

  10. Moo says:

    Maybe it’s time for another one of those anthropomorphic abstraction characters to come along. A giant old lady representing obsessive cleanliness who comes at the Phoenix with a huge cosmic broom, swats it out of the universe for good, and then walks away like a boss.

  11. mark coale says:

    So, Phoenix is really Marvel’s Parallax in a way.

  12. Thom H. says:

    @wwk5d: “Didn’t Jean refer to the Phoenix as a cosmic entity at times during Claremont’s run?”

    Yes, but that’s only after all of the X-Factor shenanigans outlined in the conversation above. I could be wrong (and if I am, please tell me), but in the original Phoenix arc (from her first appearance to her death on the moon) no one ever spoke of something inhabiting Jean. It’s just that she was suddenly amazingly powerful. Claremont joined in the fun once Byrne, et al. changed Jean’s story.

    “But wasn’t Morrison the one to introduce the White Hot room and all those other Phoenixes (including Quire) in his last issue?”

    Totally — but that doesn’t mean something from the outside came to inhabit them. I think the idea (and again, correct me if I’m wrong) was that multiple individuals could manifest the Phoenix because of their innate power. Quentin was another (potentially) omega-level mutant whose power allowed him to tap into Phoenix energy, which was never shown as a separate thing flying around. It was always spoken of as a profound and subtle connection to the universe, never as an invading entity.

  13. Thom H. says:

    @FUBAR007: “What I’ve always wanted to know is why no one at Marvel ever thought to take the shorter, cleaner route and simply reveal that Madelyne was Jean. She had no past. She had no relatives. They could’ve even worked in Busiek’s idea into her background somehow.”

    YES. And then Scott could have stayed with his family instead of abruptly and uncharacteristically dumping them for Jean.

  14. Si says:

    Silver Surfer introduced the Never Queen, which has also been used in Ultimates, and embodies a lot of the cosmic personification stuff attributed to Phoenix, so things will only get more awkward for X-Twitchers from now on.

    And can I just say the worst possible story you could write about young Jean Grey is her dying and being reborn because of the Phoenix. Time was the “Jean Grey keeps coming back” joke was unmerited. What next? Young Cyclops being in love with her? Young Angel getting wings that make him want to kill? Young Beast turning into a furry monster? Endlessly circling the drain …

    That said, I have this idea for Phoenix that would untangle a lot. So there’s a cosmic entity made of psychic energy. The reason it takes the form of a giant firebird is that’s just the most natural shape for psychic energy at that scale to take. Just as a sphere is the most natural shape for large amounts of matter in space. But this means any sufficiently powerful psychic is going to start looking like a Phoenix, maybe even thinking they are Phoenix. There could be any number of entities out there that look a lot like Phoenix, but only one is the real deal. And just like Doombots, you get to choose which stories are the real Phoenix.

  15. wwk5d says:

    “Yes, but that’s only after all of the X-Factor shenanigans outlined in the conversation above.”

    No. Jean mentions it in Uncanny #137. For whatever reason, I can’t post the link to the page here, but check out Uncanny #137. It’s rights after Wolverine throws Colossus at Jean and he punches her.

    “Quentin was another (potentially) omega-level mutant whose power allowed him to tap into Phoenix energy, which was never shown as a separate thing flying around. It was always spoken of as a profound and subtle connection to the universe, never as an invading entity.”

    So…Jean had an innate power that was a connection to the universe that others could…tap into?

  16. Col_Fury says:

    Re: wwk5d

    I think the idea is that certain mutants’ powers allow them to eventually attain the next step in evolution. Think of 2001: A Space Odyssey; when Dave realizes what everything means he achieves the next level of humanity, which brings him closer to the cosmos (or whatever). Jean had become the next level of being, in this scenario.

    And then, at some point in the future, Quentin has acquired the same “achievement.”

    But of course all of this moot. But it’s still neat. 🙂 I like the way you think, Thom H.! 🙂

  17. wwk5d says:

    But Quentin’s “achievement” as explained above isn’t his own, he is somehow tapping into the Phoenix Force, which is created by Jean.

    Then again, considering how she is the Royal Crown or whatever, it could make sense, if all the other people using the Phoenix Force are tapping into her power or something.

  18. Col_Fury says:

    Well yeah, it’s not “her” power; it’s the cosmos’. The “Phoenix Force” would be the *power of the cosmos.* Or rather, the power that Jean tapped into first.

    Trust me. This all makes sense if you’re drinking scotch. 😉

  19. Brendan says:

    Jean is such a dull character, with or without Phoenix. I can’t understand what the publisher hopes to gain with two of her.

  20. Thom H. says:

    @wwk5d: “No. Jean mentions it in Uncanny #137.”

    Thanks for pointing this out. I checked #137, and it’s crazy how many different things are said about the relationship between Jean and the Phoenix. But it’s right there, like you said:

    Jean: “Now, finally, I truly understand what I am…two beings — Jean Grey and Phoenix…separate…unique…bound together. A symbiote…The Phoenix is a cosmic power…return it to the cosmos which is its home.”

    While Jean’s not exactly a reliable narrator in that scene, Claremont is clearly trying to establish the idea that the Phoenix is inhabiting Jean. He even has the Watcher say something to that effect, too. I stand corrected.

  21. Thom H. says:

    @wwk5d: “But Quentin’s “achievement” as explained above isn’t his own, he is somehow tapping into the Phoenix Force, which is created by Jean.”

    I still stand by my assertion that Morrison fixed the Phoenix concept, and he did so by making it a force that comes from within extremely powerful mutants, not from outside.

    Morrison has a theory that we’re all connected, all ultimately one being in different temporary forms. It’s something he saw while on a drug trip in the desert, apparently. He describes it as everyone being fingers on a hand, except we only see the fingers, not the hand that connects us all.

    So the Phoenix can be something that comes from within, and is meaningful to, an individual person but is still shared by those who can access it through their connection to something larger. Each instance of the Phoenix is unique, but it’s ultimately a “cosmic force” in the sense of something intangible that we can all personally express. Like love or hate.

    I could go on and on about my theory, but this is probably enough unless I’m writing my own blog. Suffice it to say that Morrison alludes to his “fingers and hand” theory in New X-Men #138 right before Quentin dies and isn’t seen again until he’s in the White Hot Room. So it’s in the text, but just kind of oblique.

  22. Paul says:

    The plot of the Dark Phoenix Saga involves the alien races already being aware of Phoenix. So there’s undoubtedly a basis in the original story for the notion that the Phoenix exists independently of her.

  23. FUBAR007 says:

    Some additional context regarding the nature of the Phoenix:

    Claremont’s original vision was that Jean was Phoenix and Phoenix was Jean. There was no “Phoenix Force”. Over time, this evolved into the Phoenix being Claremont’s cosmological avatar of the passion of creation, death, rebirth, etc. and Jean being its human incarnation. Based on interviews with him in recent years, he still sees things this way.

    Based on some of his design notes, Cockrum’s view was that Jean was a split personality, and Phoenix was her uninhibited, vastly more powerful subconscious self. This was similar to how Brett Ratner portrayed things in X-Men: The Last Stand.

    The idea that the Phoenix was a separate entity seems to have originated with John Byrne. His vision was that the Phoenix was an evil space creature possessing Jean. To drive that point home, he had Dark Phoenix commit the genocide of the D’Bari. His intent was for the Shi’ar to exorcise Phoenix from Jean by partially lobotomizing her, leaving her mentally disabled and permanently child-like. Later on, of course, he latched onto Busiek’s Phoenix-replacing-Jean retcon idea.

    TL;DR: the divergent and sometimes paradoxical portrayals of Jean’s relationship with Phoenix stem from a creative tug of war between Claremont and Byrne.

  24. Moo says:

    Hnh. Man wasn’t lying. Scotch did help with this. What spirit should I pair with the multiple Xorn explanation?

  25. Moo says:

    And why is Jean wearing Ray Palmer’s costume in X-Men Red?

  26. SanityOrMadness says:

    > And why is Jean wearing Ray Palmer’s costume in X-Men Red?

    …wut? It’s basically her Jim Lee suit with tweaked colours and details.

    This is Ray Palmer’s costume: http://orig08.deviantart.net/707b/f/2014/030/f/5/the_atom_ray_palmer_wallpaper_by_kalel1986-d74fnap.png

  27. Moo says:

    Yes, I know what Ray Palmer’s costume looks like, and she still looks like she’s dressed up like him to me.

  28. Voord 99 says:

    On the Phoenix thing:

    It’s not something where I’ve exactly committed the details to memory, but doesn’t Claremont’s X-Men/Teen Titans crossover (1982) sort of depend for its plot on the idea the Phoenix Force is more than just Jean?

  29. Taibak says:

    All this and you guys haven’t even gotten into Rachel’s relationship with the Phoenix yet. O:-)

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